2020 Sponsorship Year In Review: The State Of Sports Marketing

Hookit’s 2020 Sponsorship Year In Review is compiled to allow marketers to benchmark their brand against other brands in their segment who are also investing in sports sponsorship as well as across industry verticals. This report focused on nearly 8,000 brands sponsoring major professional sports leagues, teams, and athletes.

Despite the pandemic, sports properties were still able to drive $7.9B in sponsorship value for partners through their social media channels. Though total posts by sports entities and the interactions on those posts were down across the board in 2020 compared to 2019, the world of sports continued to grow, adding over 2B new social followers. When it comes to value for brands, COVID-19 and the global sports shutdown beginning in March had a significant impact, likely causing a loss of over $600M in sponsorship value. While a massive amount of value was lost, sports entities were able to pivot many activations to digital this year as “make-goods” for in-person activations that couldn’t happen due to the pandemic.

These make-goods contributed to an overall +8.3% rise in sponsorship value generated through deliberate brand promotion in 2020 over 2019.Overall, global apparel giant, Nike, once again dominated all brands in terms of sponsorship value received from the sports ecosystem with over $470M in AAV (Adjusted Ad Value). Apparel & Accessories brands combined to be the #1 industry in sponsorship by value received.

The top 5 industries (Apparel & Accessories, Financial, Automotive, Beverage, and Travel) accounted for 58% of the total sponsorship value created across the entire sports ecosystem. Gambling brands saw significant gains over 2019, with many over doubling the number of sports properties promoting their brand and growing the value received from partners by over 130% as a category.

Download the full report – https://go.hookit.com/2020yir